The Mafia Encyclopedia (50 page)

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Authors: Carl Sifakis

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the Kefauver committee. He told the senators that after Prohibition he "needed a job" as he could no longer sell sugar to bootleggers, and he went to Tom Pendergast for assistance. He said Pendergast fixed it up so he got a cut of a keno gambling game run by some local racketeers. With a straight face, Balestrere said he had not put up any money. "I just went up there every month and checked up there and they give me a check, and I walk right out."
"In other words, Tom Pendergast simply gave you a sort of gift?" he was asked.
"Give me something to live."
Then, amazingly, Charley Binaggio did the same sort of thing, just sort of giving him a piece of a gambling joint known as Green Hills. It happened, Balestrere said, one day as he was just walking to the movies. He ran into Binaggio who asked, "What are you doing?"
The old mafioso told the Kefauver committee: "I said, 'Ain't doing nothing. I am trying to do some, to open me a little business or something like that.' He said, 'You know, I am getting a piece out at the Green Hills. Do you want any?' 'Oh,' I said, 'I am not much in the gambling business. I don't know much about it.'
"He said, 'Well, that is all right.' I didn't see him no more. About thirty days later he came in and brought me some money. I said, 'What is this?' He said, 'We win, and here is your end.' Okay, I took the money."
In all he got $5,000, he said.
Tongue in cheek, committee chief counsel Rudolph Halley asked what would have happened if Binaggio had told Balestrere he had lost $500. Balestrere became very earnest and said, "With the kid, I used to know him so well, I don't think he would tell me anything out of the way."
Binaggio eventually told someone something out of the way, and he and Gargotta were subjected to underworld execution in 1950. Their deaths together with Lococo's imprisonment for income tax fraud spelled the end of the Five Iron Men, although the Mafia influence did not die in Kansas City. By the 1970s, Mafia power had passed to Nick Civella who became a power in Las Vegas gambling and, in partnership with the Chicago family, instrumental in putting the later-discredited Roy Williams in as head of the Teamsters. When Civella went to prison in the 1970s, it was said he still ran his crime family from behind bars despite the power struggle that ensued between Carlo De Luna and Carlo Civella for position.
See also:
Binaggio, Charles
.
Five Points Gang: Pre-Prohibition gang
Probably more modern-day gang leaders came out of the turn-of-the-century Five Points Gang and its allied organizations than from any other outfit in America. The Five Pointers were the last great pre-Prohibition gang in New York, composed of an army of about 1,500 eye-gouging terrorists, virtually all Italian. They represented the transition between the 19th-century cutthroat Irish street gangssuch as the Dead Rabbits, the Plug Uglies and the Whyosand the outfits of the 1920s, which formed the nucleus of what became organized crime in America.
The only chieftain the Five Points Gang ever had was an ex-bantamweight prizefighter of some skill named Paolo Antonini Vaccarelli, but better known as Paul Kelly. In the pre-World War I era of union organizing and union busting, Kelly leased out his troops to businessmen as strikebreakers, to other mobs as hit men for hire and to politicians to control voting.
Kelly was an efficient organizer, and members of youth gangs that flocked to him for recognition hoped for nothing more than eventually to gain admission to the Five Pointers proper. One of Kelly's most ardent admirers was Johnny Torrio, then a young man in his early 20s, who ran a youth gang called the James Street Gang under Kelly's tutelage. Thus, through Torrio, Kelly became in future years the sponsor and spiritual godfather of such very young gangsters as A1 Capone, Lucky Luciano and Frankie Yale. While the Five Pointers were virtually all Italian and fought many a battle with Monk Eastman and his equally large and powerful collection of Jewish gangsters, Kelly recruited some other ethnics. Among them were the likes of the Jewish Kid Dropper who was, before his murder in 1923, the biggest labor slugger-extortionist in the postwar era. Kelly was probably the first to indicate to Torrioand certainly to Lucianothat Italians could cooperate with gangsters of other nationalities in the quest for money. It was a lesson that Luciano never forgot.
Kelly maintained his headquarters in the New Brighton Dance Hall on Great Jones Street. He owned the place, which was one of Manhattan's fleshpots and a magnet for slumming socialites eager to rub shoulders with a real live gang leader like Kelly. Kelly could play the role because he was dapper and urbane, with a certain amount of self-education and a touch of cultural tastes. For many he became Society's naughty darling.
However, it was criminality that kept Kelly and the Five Pointers going. By 1915 the gang was rapidly deteriorating. With reform movements, labor slugging faded as an activity, and late that year Kelly found a permanent little niche for himself in a little labor fiefdomorganizing the Garbage Scow Trimmers Union, the ragpickers on the dumps at the East River and several other small but later influential harbor unions. Kelly left his bailiwick on the Lower East Side and moved into a house at 352 East ll6th Street, owned
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by his gangland friends, the Morello family and Ciro Terranova.
All that remained of the Five Pointers were their heritage and their successful graduatesTorrio, Capone, Luciano, Yale and others, who went on to raise the heights of criminal power during the Prohibition era.
Flamingo Hotel: Las Vegas's first plush casino
It started with the Flamingo, the first of Las Vegas's glittering casinos. It was built with mob money under the supervision of violent and colorful Bugsy Siegel.
Siegel, a longtime associate of Meyer Lanskywith Lucky Luciano one of the top two powers in organized crime in Americahad come west in the late 1930s to handle the mob's betting empire. In time, he became a fervent shill for turning Las Vegas, then a dusty stop in the middle of the desert, into a glittering gambling paradise.
Actually, Lansky had pioneered the idea and sent an aide, Moe Sedway, there in 1941. At the end of World War II, Siegel, Sedway, Gus Greenbaum and Israel ''Ice Pick Willie" Aldermanall close Lansky associatesbought a small night club there. They later sold the place and invested the revenues in the Nevada Project Corporation, the vehicle that financed the building of the Flamingo. Lansky was exercising a tactic he had learned by studying the ways of big business, having underlings go out front on an idea and then step forward to take the credit if things worked out right.
But Siegel appeared to be doing nothing right in building the hotel, which he named the Flamingo, the nickname of his mistress, Virginia Hill, the former bedmate of numerous high mafiosi from coast to coast. From the beginning, construction was beset by troubles that led to inflation of the costs. Anxious mobsters saw their investments being gobbled up$2 million became $4 million which became $6 millionand started worrying that Bugsy was doing more than wasting their money. Virginia, a practiced bag woman taking mob money to Switzerland to be stashed in numbered accounts, started going there regularly on Bugsy's behalf. When asked why she was flying off to Zurich so often, she got rather vague, mumbling that she was shopping for furnishings and curtains for the hotel. The mob had a different theory, that Siegel was skimming off the construction money and had tucked away more than a half million dollars in his personal account.
The building contractor, Del E. Webb, got pretty concerned about a sudden influx of mobsters on the site and complained to Siegel about it. The handsome gangster laughed and assured Webb not to worry. He used a line that was to become a classic, "We only kill each other."
At the time Siegel probably still thought he could survive. The mob, from Lansky on down, had advised him they wanted their money back. Bugsy undoubtedly thought he could pay them back by skimming off the profits once the Flamingo opened. Unfortunately, the opening was a disaster. Siegel, a man about Hollywood, had assembled a top-flight cast to attract an expected horde of guestsGeorge Jessel was master of ceremonies and featured stars included Jimmy Durante, Baby Rose Marie, the Turn Toppers, Eddie Jackson, and Xavier Cugat and his band. Among the guests were some of Siegel's Hollywood friends, George Raft, George Sanders, Charles Coburn; but many more did not show up. Among other errors, Siegel had staged his opening between Christmas and New Year's, a period considered deadly in the entertainment business.
Siegel's fate was then sealed, and a death sentence was passed on him at a famous meeting in Havana presided over by the deported Lucky Luciano. Lansky, who actually called the meeting, did little or nothing to save Siegel. Bugsy was assassinated the following June. By the end of the year new management inserted by Lansky had turned the Flamingo around and it made a $4 million profitand that was nothing compared to the unreported profits that were skimmed off.
The Flamingo was a huge success, even if it killed Bugsy Siegel. The mob began pouring millions into Las Vegas, building casino after casino. The Flamingo had a checkered history thereafter, always involving Lansky, although he did not appear as an owner of record. In the mid-1950s, the Flamingo was bought by the ParvinDohrman Company which was headed by Albert B. Parvin, a one-time interior decorator whose chief claim to fame previously was having laid the carpets in many of the big hotels. In 1960, Parvin sold the place to a syndicate headed by Miami Beach hotel man Morris Landsburgh (of the Eden Roc) who was coincidentally an old buddy of Lansky's. Lansky collected a $200,000 finder's fee from Parvin in the transaction. Landsburgh and his associates tired of the Flamingo when the government started digging into allegations of skimming in Las Vegas. In 1967 they sold out to Kirk Kerkorian, a former non-scheduled airline operator. And Lansky collected a fee when that sale was made. Lansky (along with five others) was indicted for skimming $30 million from the Flamingo from 1960 to 1967; he was accused of having hidden interests in the Flamingo during those years.
Lansky was not convicted on any of the charges.
See also:
Greenbaum, Gus; Las Vegas; Siegel, Benjamin "Bugsy."
Forty Thieves: Harlem's black rivals of the Mafia
Black ghettos have long been prime looting ground for the Mafia's gambling operations. While there is much talk about the blacks taking over numbers operations,
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the fact remains that most numbers banks run by ghetto residents are required to pay franchise fees to the Mafia. Recently and for years for example, a top Harlem operator, Raymond Marquez, paid Fat Tony Salerno of the Genovese family 5 percent of his take just to operate. That figure was extremely low because Marquez had always been a favorite of top mafiosi, his father having worked for Vito Genovese.
The belief that blacks own and operate their own racketsas much an example of black pride as anything elseis nothing new in the black ghettos. In Harlem in the late 1930s, an extremely tough gang of blacks, the Forty Thieves, came along. According to ghetto folklore, they effectively battled the East Harlem mobsters for a piece of the numbers business and did not make payoffs to the Italians.
If there is truth to this legend, the truth is odd. It certainly would represent an abrupt change in organized crime's tactics in Harlem. Dutch Schultz had moved in during the early 1930s to take over the Harlem numbers from black independents who had run it when the organized criminals failed to appreciate the racket's potential. Once Schultz did so, he moved with savage efficiency to take over. His enforcers used guns, knives, blackjacks, brass knuckles and, more imaginatively, wet cement (to blind a victim). A legendary black woman operator, Madame St. Clair, had to hide in a cellar under a pile of coal to keep from being murdered by some of Schultz's hit men. Schultz used Ciro Terranova's gunners to keep Harlem under control and when the empire passed after the Dutchman's death to the supervision of the brutal Trigger Mike Coppola, the enforcement tactics did not ease.
Despite these obvious facts, a mystique built up around the Forty Thieves. These undoubtedly tough gangsters started out as an extortion ring, operating from 140th Street and Seventh Avenue. In 1939, they established what they described as their own policy setup. Harlemites fully believed that the Forty Thieves bankers ran their banks without paying a cent to the East Harlem syndicate. The Forty Thieves claimed as much to other blacks and said they maintained their own hit men who kept Mafia mobsters away. The perception was that Italian criminals had no stomach for battling tough blacks; but the argument still seems specious. The full force of the Italian underworld would have come into play.
In fact, the mob probably could have tamed the Forty Thieves without using force. Other black operatives functioned only by paying off Coppola, who saw to it that they operated with minimal police interference. Recalcitrant Forty Thieves would have faced not only gangland violence but also official harassment. Most likely the Forty Thieves paid, like other blacks, but found their posture of supposed deadly independence very valuable in "selling" their extortion shakedowns. After all, there was not much hope for a small black businessman standing up to black racketeers who supposedly took the measure of the Mafia.
See also:
Black Mafia
.
Forty-Two Gang: Chicago juvenile gangsters
The worst juvenile gang produced in the United States, the 42 Gang was certainly the best "farm team" Chicago's Capone Mob ever had. It would be hard to find a bigger collection of crazies than the notorious 42 Gangeven the Jewish and Italian cliques of Brownsville and Ocean Hill, Brooklyn, gangs feeding Murder, Inc., did not supply anywhere nearly the number of soldiers for the national crime syndicate. And surely no juvenile gang gave Chicago police nearly as much trouble as the 42ers.
More is known about the 42ers than other criminal gangs because they were the specific subjects of many scholarly analyses. In 1931, an in-depth study by sociologists of the University of Chicago revealed some incredible statistics. Of members considered to be in the original 42, more than 30 had been maimed, killed or were serving time for such crimes as murder, armed robbery, rape (a prime gang pastime) or other felonies. Ready to commit any act for a quick buck, they stripped cars; robbed cigar stores; marched into nightclubs and staged holdups; slipped into peddlers' stables and stole their carts or killed their horses, hacking off the hind legs to supply certain outlets with horse meat. In their homethe "Patch," or the Little Italy section of Chicago's West Sidethey were idolized by many neighborhood girls, who became both their sexual playthings and valuable accessories in criminal activities. The girls acted as lookouts and, more important, as "gun girls," carrying the gangsters' weapons under their skirts so the boys were "clean'' if intercepted and searched by the police.
The gang's name was taken from the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. They called themselves the 42 Gang because they figured they were one better than the thieves plus Ali Baba. Actually, when they were founded in 1925, the gang totaled no more than 24, some as young as nine years old, but over the years they actually did total about 42. They suffered considerable attrition through violence and arrest, but so did their enemies. The gang killed a number of robbery victims, stool pigeons and policemen.
The boys' reformatory at St. Charles seemed like the home away from home for the 42ers. Back in 1928 Major William J. Butler, the institution's head, got a long-distance warning from a gang member. He was

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